Re: Question: Etherenet Link Detection

["Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdlab.org>]

Tim Hockin wrote:
> 
> > It's traditionally been defined as MII information, but that's
> > awfully slow, so some Ethernet controllers make it available
> > in a quicker manner.
> >
> > ethtool might do this (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/);
> > I don't know for sure.
> 
> The only interface to this is through MII, unless we want to add an ETHTOOL
> style ioctl to get the link status.  This means, however, that every driver
> that wants to report this needs to support at least a subset of ethtool
> ioctls, which VERY FEW do.

Right.  I think that Jeff was thinking about this for 2.5 (what's
that?),
but I'm not trying to speak for Jeff.

Or maybe this has already been discussed on these mailing lists:
  linux-net@vger.kernel.org or netdev@oss.sgi.com

~Randy